Born and raised in Baghdad, Mr. Fuad Mishu was an engineer, musician, and an avid connoisseur of classical music and the Iraqi Maqam. In the late 1970s, he moved to the US with his family, where he started collecting and organizing music recordings, mainly on cassettes. By the end of the 1990s, his collection was home to more than 3000+ cassettes. Mr. Mishu, along with his friend in Chicago, Mr. Raad Hermez, spent the following decade digitizing and copying the cassettes and sharing them with the community. Today, Mr. Mishu’s collection remains one of the largest of Iraqi traditional music.

Born and raised in Mosul, Mr. Saad al-Jadir was an Iraqi intellectual, businessman, and musician. He moved to London in the 1960s, where he also became a community leader. Despite his busy work life, Mr. al-Jadir’s love for music led him to learn classical and flamenco guitar and compile one of the most comprehensive audio collections of music from Iraq and beyond. Mr. al-Jadir spent decades collecting rare recordings and more than a decade copying thousands of hours of music, preserving a heritage of precious Iraqi music for the next generations.

Hamid Al-Saadi is an Iraqi Maqam reciter and the only person in his generation to have memorized and mastered all pieces of the traditional Baghdadi repertoire. Starting in the 1980s, Al-Saadi began to learn to sing and memorize poetry by listening to recordings on cassettes. Over two decades, he amassed 1,200 cassettes of Iraqi Maqam performances of mostly live concerts, public and private.